A Riddle Wrapped In A Mystery Inside An Enigma
by Miss I Know
Summary: Tom is determined to not be Voldemort. After all Voldemort loses in the end and taking over the world would be too much work. Especially for someone already dealing with being "reborn in a fictional world" situation. Now, if only everyone else would get the message Tom isn't their future Dark Lord. A SI/OC-insert as Tom Marvolo Riddle in the Harry Potter World with a twist.


Prologue

Tom had always been aware he was a bit strange.

It wasn't that he was the only fatherless boy in the village, lots of families had lost husbands during the wars and rebellions. Tom's situation was only unique in the fact his mother wouldn't name her husband. Which led to more than a few whispers about Tom being a bastard. Tom ignored them though, he didn't much care if he was a bastard or not. He did care that it made people look badly on his Mum. She always insisted that she'd married his father so Tom would defend against the rumors and dirty looks with words and fists when necessary. So, being fatherless didn't make Tom that unique.

It wasn't that he was originally English, though some still muttered about it. Mum had taken him to Ireland when he was less than two years old and he learned to speak and grew up here. Honestly, he didn't even sound English, not like his Mum. The entirety of his memories for this life were in Ireland and England was just a distant place on the map. A strange one at that, especially considering how much Mum disliked talking about it. So, though everyone knew he was English, he sounded so much and acted so much like any of the other boys in town they often forgot. A blessing considering the still tense feelings where the English were concerned.

It wasn't his looks, though Tom was quite handsome. He'd been a pretty baby, according to his Mum, and he knew by now he looked better than average. Much better looking than one would expect seeing his Mum. He was tall for his age, fair skinned, with thick black hair, and dark eyes that no one could agree on whether they were black or very dark blue. He stood out even in his secondhand clothes. His Mum would brush back his hair when she got in one of her melancholy moods and say he looked just like his father. He wasn't the only handsome lad in town though. Darren O'Hare was good looking too, Tom knew. A few years older than Tom, taller and more filled out than the slender brunette. He was already making girls heads turn with his dark green eyes, bright red hair and brighter smile more than handsome enough to make people forgot any rumors of strangeness surrounding him. So, he may be handsome but handsome people weren't so rare.

No, Tom was strange in different quieter ways. Little things that marked him as strange. He'd once even heard one of the older women in town, Siofra, muttering that he was a changeling child. He's heard stories about he never cried as a child, just looked at everyone with big quiet eyes always looking, not making a sound. Mum told him she'd been worried something was wrong until he finally started talking, clear as could be when he was three. He never lost his penchant for going quiet and just watching though. He knew it unnerved people, sometimes he did it to unnerve people. Tom knew people were used to him now marking him just as a quiet solemn child who loved his books.

Tom didn't feel particularly solemn, but he knew it was better than telling people the reason he got so quiet was to listen better. Tom had always heard the Whispers. Or at least that's what Tom called them. They weren't quite sound, but it was the best description he could find. The whispers come from different sources. Some places had whispers, like his Mum's work, the Whispers were always about there trembling in the air and talking of creation and bubbling and a crisp smell of plants. People also had Whispers, not everyone, but certain people. Mum had a Whisper, one that hissed like a snake and a sad flute, always quiet and just out of earshot. Hers was a subdued melody that didn't seem to want to be heard. Darren O'Hare and his whole family also had the Whispers, which was part of the reason Tom took notice of him. They were bright and loud and Darren was the cry of a bird, the call of the wind, and a happy lively tone. Mum's boss, Old Brandon, had a Whisper, not as loud as the O'Hares, his was a steady drumbeat, bubbling liquids, and children laughing. But it always ended on a sad note like the laughing children were gone.

Tom didn't mention the Whispers to his Mum. He didn't mention any of the strange things that happened to him to his Mum. The only time he had, when he was very young, she had looked so panicked about it he vowed to keep it secret. But strange things kept happening. It wasn't just whispering. Sometimes things would move around Tom when he didn't touch them. Animals listened to him, even though he was a stranger. When his Mum's plant was dying he'd looked at it too long and it started blooming again. Things, usually electric things, acted up around him. It was always worse when he was upset. Once he'd lost his temper badly at another boy who was saying things about his Mum and a tree almost fell on the boy. Everyone had agreed the tree was old and about to fall anyway, but Tom knew his temper had done it. He'd kept a close lid on it ever since. Tom hadn't wanted to kill some stupid kid, he'd just wanted the boy to shut up.

The strangest thing about Tom though was probably that he wasn't really a he. Or rather he was. He just hadn't always been. In his first life, a little less than a hundred years in the future he'd been a girl. Almost, but not quite a woman. He'd known it since he was born, he knew a lot of things for sure. It had been simpler when he was a kid. He and she had been more separate, but as he got older it got more mixed up.

Tom was a he, but sometimes he was also she the dead girl who missed her long hair and her old life. He knew their life was better nowadays, but it hadn't been a bad life. He'd spent all his seventh year reconciling him and her. The problem had been he'd always thought of them as separate people. Once he realized he was she and she was he, he was just sometimes more Tom than her sometimes he'd settled into something resembling peace.

He still sometimes got prickles of longing for an old body and for an old life. And sometimes he thought of himself just as she and wanted to wear dresses and the like. She knew there was nothing wrong with that, she was a girl after all, just as much as Tom had spent her life as a boy. She decided when they got older she would simply have to make time for her to be a girl sometimes and besides she'd always liked pants in her old life anyway.

Tom wasn't sure what his name had been in his old life. Sometimes he would just run through lists of names to figure it out. But nothing felt familiar. Parts of his life as her had faded. He couldn't remember his name, but he could remember his first awful day of camp when he was eleven with perfect clarity and how the other girls had nicknamed her Piggy, not a terribly original insult, but had hurt nonetheless. Not all the vivid memories were awful, some weren't even particularly meaningful. Such as the fact Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. But with the bad and mundane came the good. Like her first kiss with Rob Snowden during the County Fair that had been sweet and sticky because they'd been sharing a bag of cotton candy before they'd gotten on the ferris wheel. That memory was so vivid sometimes Tom could taste the sweet candy flavor on his tongue like a phantom.

He'd known since his first conscious realization that no one needed to know about this and kept it secret even when he didn't know what a secret was. It hadn't taken Tom long to realize as he grew that no one else remembered old lives they'd lived from start to finish. Tom knew this was just as strange as his Whispers and sometimes in the quiet and lonesome he worried that he was mad. He didn't think on it long. Mad or not he could do nothing about it, except keep living.

So, he did never telling anyone quite why he was so strange. Not about his life or death or Whispers or about being a girl and a boy. Those, he decided, were his business and no one else's. Not even his Mum's.

It came as a mixture of shock and relief at age nine to realize he was neither mad nor particularly strange, at least for the most part. It was then he learned he was simply part of another quiet world. All he'd needed to do was get attacked. An incident he blamed entirely on Maireen Scannell and Darren O'Hare and his pretty green eyes.


End file.
